English Language and Literature Commons^™

Rain Shadow By Nicholas Bradley And Cloud Physics By Karen Enns, Kelly Shepherd

The Goose

Review of Nicholas Bradley's Rain Shadow and Karen Enns' Cloud Physics.

Masculinity And Chivalry: The Tenuous Relationship Of The Sacred And Secular In Medieval Arthurian Literature, Kaci Mccourt

English Dissertations - Archive

Concepts of masculinity and chivalry in the medieval period were socially constructed, within both the sacred and the secular realms. The different meanings of these concepts were not always easily compatible, causing tensions within the literature that attempted to portray them. The Arthurian world became a place that these concepts, and the issues that could arise when attempting to act upon them, could be explored. In this dissertation, I explore these concepts specifically through the characters of Lancelot, Galahad, and Gawain. Representative of earthly chivalry and heavenly chivalry, respectively, Lancelot and Galahad are juxtaposed in the ways in which they …

No Tv For Woodpeckers By Gary Barwin, If Pressed By Andrew Mcewan, And Ecology Without Culture: Aesthetics For A Toxic World By Christine L. Marran, Michael D. Sloane

The Goose

Review of Gary Barwin's No TV for Woodpeckers, Andrew McEwan's If Pressed, and Christine L. Marran's Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World.

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Lib 3065 (Research Methods And Resources For Writers), Christopher Tuthill

Open Educational Resources

This course explores the theoretical and practical impact of information research on writing. Students develop proficiency in evaluating, identifying, and using relevant print and web sources to locate business, government, biographic, political, social and statistical information necessary for in-depth journalistic reportage and other forms of research and writing.

Review Of Conscience In Early Modern English Literature By Abraham Stoll, John E. Curran Jr.

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Shakespeare's Hamlet As A Pilgrimage Of The Soul, Joyce Ahn

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study proposes a reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a pilgrimage of the soul. There has been a consistent strain in Shakespeare scholarship which seeks to understand Hamlet and its peculiarly universal appeal in terms of its evocation of the human condition. Some examples of such commentary: Hamlet abounds in the disease imagery and is suffused with a mysterious sense of doom; it is the only play in Shakespeare with an explicit reference to Christmas; it evokes the medieval cycle plays which enacted the entire salvation history from the Creation of the world to the Last Judgment; and the play …

Annotated Bibliography Assignment For English 201, Elida Deklein

Open Educational Resources

This assignment will help students of English Composition II to construct an annotated bibliography as a precursor to a research paper.

Using The Rhetoric Of Video Games To Teach The Praxis Of Critical Analysis, Jeffrey B. Doyle

Theses and Dissertations

Research has shown that video games can be successful at teaching concepts and skills to students at various grade levels. To explain how this might work, theoretical work is done to connect the concept of flow from psychology to procedural rhetoric. With the inclusion of Foucault’s theories of power, video games are shown to not be isolated experiences but connected to the power dynamics of society. In video games, these dynamics can be seen through the problematic portrayals of marginalized peoples as well as the hostile community that has developed online surrounding video games. To account for these issues, but …

Panopticism In A Digital Age: An Examination Of Transmedia Reimagining Jane Eyre, April L. Gonzales

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to examine how content creators, Nessa Aref and Alysson Hall have reinterpreted the original character Jane Eyre in a modern and social media era. The main struggle emphasized is that between an ideal self and societies expectations. Societies expectations and the expression of self are both more influenced by economics and business. The creators of The Autobiography of Jane Eyre heavily emphasize the motivations behind appearances. The creators shift Jane’s character so she is able to navigate within these expectations and the influence present in a digital world.

Refusing To Be Made Whole: Disability In Contemporary Black Women's Writing, Anna Hinton

English Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation argues that disability profoundly shapes the thematic and aesthetic choices of black women writing in the post-Brown era, despite arguments that suggest the contrary. For instance, Gayl Jone’s Corregidora is told from the first-person perspective of a black woman diagnosed as insane and incarcerated in a psychiatric prison for murder. The use of the first-person results in what I argue, building on Michael Berube’s work, is a disabled text. Moreover, a through the protagonist’s story, a stark critique of misogynoir and ableism emerges. Thus, while taking seriously disability studies scholars’ arguments that African American writers and activists …

The Witch, The Blonde, And The Cultural "Other": Applying Cluster Criticism To Grimm And Disney Princess Stories, Valerie F. Garza

Theses and Dissertations

The Brothers Grimm and the Walt Disney Company have produced popular fairy tales for large audiences. In this work, cluster criticism—a rhetorical criticism that involves identifying key terms and charting word clusters around those terms—is applied to four Grimm fairy tales and four Disney princess films. This study aims to reveal the worldview of the rhetors and explore how values present in Grimm tales manifest in contemporary Disney films. Disney princess films in this study have been categorized as “White/European” and “Non-White/Cultural ‘Other.’” Because film is a form of non-discursive rhetoric, an adaptation of cluster criticism designed for film was …

Linguistics In Secondary Education: Teachers' Perceptions Of Linguistics In The Classroom, Ayla Aizza Galvan

Theses and Dissertations

Theoretical linguistics is an area of English study focusing on the abstract components of language: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. By 11th and 12th grade, students in the United States have been tested on linguistic concepts, as per state examination standards. English Language Arts teachers can introduce theoretical linguistic investigation and terms to their students, but this is not happening. The paper reviews why theoretical linguistic analysis is not thoroughly implemented in classrooms, successful classroom linguistic investigation in other countries and some U.S., and how linguistic investigation can be part of classroom curriculum. The research incorporates survey data from …

Reaching The Sacred Through The Secular: Biblical Elements And The Superiority Of Divine Love In Three Of Marie De France’S Lais, Sarah J. Kooienga

Masters Theses

In the Prologue to her Lais, Marie de France hints that her text possesses multiple layers of meaning: “The custom among the ancients…was to speak quite obscurely / in the books they wrote, / so that those who were to come after / and study them / might gloss the letter / and supply its significance from their own wisdom” (9, 11-16). Critics who study the Lais agree that the tales overwhelmingly focus on romantic love, and most of the existing scholarship overlooks the fact that this theme is merely one layer of the text’s significance. To the contrary, …

“Who Has A Right To Say What Focus Is The Legitimate Focus?” Tennessee Williams And Julia Margaret Cameron’S Theatrical Portraits Of Women, Jennifer M. Klug

Masters Theses

In the production notes preceding The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams said: “Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.” In spite of Williams’s emphasis on the limitations of literal representation, some of his most famous female characters were created in a tradition similar to that of portraits of women by the Victorian-era photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Both Cameron and Williams made …

Annie Dillard: At The Altar Of Nature, Kelley A. Kasul

Masters Theses

This thesis intends to delve into Annie Dillard’s time spent at Tinker Creek. Why Dillard chose to go into nature is critiqued, as well as what she found. One of the things it appears Annie Dillard sought and found was a connection to the Divine. She had been searching for this connection in various churches but had not found what she needed there. There is another, perhaps more pressing, issue of the mystical journey Dillard went on as well. This was an internal journey, not a physical journey. Both of these topics are vetted for the purposes of furthering the …

Mumbai Macbeth: Gender And Identity In Bollywood Adaptations, Rashmila Maiti

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project analyzes adaptation in the Hindi film industry and how the concepts of gender and identity have changed from the original text to the contemporary adaptation. The original texts include religious epics, Shakespeare’s plays, Bengali novels which were written pre-independence, and Hollywood films. This venture uses adaptation theory as well as postmodernist and postcolonial theories to examine how women and men are represented in the adaptations as well as how contemporary audience expectations help to create the identity of the characters in the films. Ultimately, this project hopes to fulfil the gap in scholarship on adaptations in Bollywood.

Trinity, Freedom, And Evil: The Importance Of The Triune Nature Of God In The Problem Of Evil, Seth Pryor

Masters Theses

This thesis presents an abductive argument for a trinitarian conception of God as opposed to a unitarian conception especially when juxtaposed against the problem of evil. On the whole, this author argues, the Trinity has more conceptual resources to answer the problem of evil by granting freedom of the will to its creation, specifically the will to go against God, by himself consisting in an inherently relational ontological structure of three persons yet the same being that would grant such a capability.

Using Mindset Pedagogy To Promote Growth And Increase Efficacy In Student Writers, Sara Hoeve

Dissertations

This dissertation offers four in-depth, vivid profiles of twelfth grade writers and the ways in which writing mindsets impact self-beliefs and inform the writing process. The multiple case study explores the impact of a mindset pedagogy, which is defined as an instructional paradigm that emphasizes the malleable nature of writing, as an ability that can be developed with effort, learning, and dedication over time. This belief contrasts the notion that writing ability is fixed trait that cannot be significantly developed over time.

Derived from Dweck's mindset theory, my dissertation argues for a discipline-specific construct of the "writing mindset,” which refers …

Self-Reliance, Social Welfare, And Sacred Landscapes: Mormon Agricultural Spaces And Their Paradoxical Sense Of Place, Anthony Ross Garner

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

What is the sense of place of Mormon agricultural landscapes? That is to say, what makes an LDS Church-owned welfare farm or a Mormon family garden meaningful to those who interact with it? In formulating a partial answer to this question, this thesis demonstrates how religious ideals of self-reliance and social welfare explicitly define Mormon agricultural landscapes, providing a sacred sense of their purpose to those who work and benefit from them. However, these sacred landscapes are complicated by developments of industrial agricultural equipment, corporate institutions, and urban demographics, which tend to isolate people from each other and the land …

“[Taking] Responsibility For The Community”: Women Claiming Power And Legitimacy In Technical And Professional Communication In India, 1999-2016, Breeanne Matheson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Though the field of technical and professional communication has long been saturated with the narratives of Euro-Western males, technical and professional communication as a field has a responsibility to expand the lens of study to include the experiences of global and nontraditional practitioners. This study examines the experiences of Indian women working as practitioners, building power and legitimacy in a globalized economy. Drawing from interviews with 49 practitioners as well as an analysis of historical documents, this study examines the methods that Indian practitioners have used to build power and legitimacy by founding professional organizations, leveraging their educational opportunities, and …